Lehigh Valley players recall vastly different NFL draft 40 years ago

Once upon a time, before the creation of 24-hour sports networks and the Internet, the NFL draft was a relatively anonymous procedure. (Morning Call staff)

Of The Morning Call

NFL draft vastly different 40 years ago

Once upon a time, before the creation of 24-hour sports networks and the Internet, the NFL draft was a relatively anonymous procedure.

The logistics were pretty much the same — team representatives gathered in a hotel ballroom, most of the time in New York City, and made their picks after consulting with the organization's "war room" by phone in their home city. There was no television, no players present to pose for pictures with commissioner Pete Rozelle.

There was little, if any, media in the draft room at all. Throughout the day, teams revealed their picks to the news outlets in their markets, but generally the majority of football fans (and, indeed, even some players themselves) got most of their information about the draft in the following day's newspaper.

There also wasn't the current three-month build-up back then, either. For example, the 1975 draft was held on Jan. 27 at the Hilton at Rockefeller Center, less than two weeks after Pittsburgh beat Minnesota 16-6 in Super Bowl IX for its first championship and less than a month after the college football season ended on New Year's Day.

"To tell you the truth, I never gave much thought to the draft," Mike Hartenstine, a consensus All-American defensive end in 1974 at Penn State, recalled recently. "I figured if I was drafted, I'd give [the NFL] a shot. If I wasn't, I move on."

Just 27 days after Hartenstine, Tommy Donchez and Jeff Bleamer helped Penn State hammer Southwest Conference champion Baylor 41-20 in the Cotton Bowl, they were three of the record five players from Lehigh Valley high schools selected among the NFL draft's 17 rounds.

Liberty's Hartenstine was the fifth selection of the second round (31st overall) by the Chicago Bears. Donchez, a fullback who was also Hartenstine's teammate at Liberty, was the Buffalo Bills' fourth-round pick (107th overall).

Bleamer, an offensive lineman from Dieruff, was taken by the Eagles on the eighth round (No. 198). Two rounds later, the Eagles picked Quakertown's Ken Schroy, a defensive back at Maryland, with the 258th selection.

Finally, on the 17th round — imagine how long ESPN's coverage of a 17-round draft would take — the Baltimore Colts selected another Terrapin defensive back and Schroy's roommate, Catasauqua's Bob Smith. He was the 419th player selected out of 443 overall.

"When you're drafted in the 17th round, you've got an uphill fight against you," quipped Smith, who made it to the Colts final cut, then gave up football to return to graduate school.

What you see …

When the 1975 college season ended (for Schroy and Smith, that came after Maryland's 7-3 loss to Tennessee in the Liberty Bowl on Dec. 16), there were no combines or even individual workouts to prepare for.

"Scouting was very informal back then," said Donchez, Penn State's leading rusher that year with 880 yards. "During the season there might be some guy on the sidelines at practice with a stopwatch taking notes, and we'd all be asking each other, 'Who is that guy?' You just weren't thinking of the NFL or the draft."

If the 1975 draft had been televised (that didn't come until 1980, two years after the creation of ESPN), chances are Hartenstine would have been among the players invited to New York. But at the time, even he was in the dark abut the workings of the draft, he said.

"I didn't know the process at all, and I don't remember talking to anybody [from the NFL before the draft]," said Hartenstine, who led the Nittany Lions that season with 104 tackles. "When you made All-American teams and things like that you kind of figure you had a good chance of getting drafted. But really, the thought never crossed my mind. I was getting ready for [the Cotton Bowl], and then after we got back it was soon time to go back to school."

The process nowadays, obviously, is vastly different.

"Now it's almost like a three-month job interview," Donchez said. "They test you, they weigh you , they measure you, you go to the combine, then you go back to school and do the same thing [at pro days] … A. lot of guys leave school early to train just so they can get their times and jumps and lifts better. What bothers me is that the NFL scouting apparatus has all this game tape on everybody, and then they seem to forget all that stuff and get wowed by how high a kid can jump or how much he can lift."

Smith, who held Maryland records for career punt returns (82) and return yardage (899) until 2001, did hear from NFL representatives — to gauge his signability. He had applied to grad school during the fall, and "teams were asking me if I was drafted, would I sign.

"I can't say I expected to get drafted," Smith said. "I had some decent stats but my speed wasn't quite what some other defensive backs was — as a strong safety and punt returner, my 4.6 40 [time] was pretty slow, even back then."

Draft day

The morning of the first day of the 1975 draft, Donchez — who had graduated in the winter — was sitting in his off-campus apartment in State College, hanging out with some friends. Hartenstine, who lived on campus, attended classes before returning to the dorm.

In 1975, Penn State's dorms had no phones in the room — there was a phone on each floor — and of course there were no cell phones, either. Hartenstine learned he was the Bears' second-round pick behind a running back named Walter Payton "either on the news that night or I read it in the paper the next day."

A day later, Hartenstine remembers, a newspaper photographer came to his dorm room and wanted to get a picture of Hartenstine receiving his draft call.

"So we went out in the hall to the phone, I held it up to my ear and smiled while he snapped a few pictures," Hartenstine said. "That's the picture that went out — two days after the draft."

Donchez had a phone in his apartment, so he was expecting a call. But he had no idea when it might come.

"With 17 rounds, if you were starting for a team like Penn State, you had a chance to go somewhere," he said. Finally, Lou Saban, Bills coach and general manager, called to welcome Donchez to Buffalo and the NFL.

It was very "low key," Donchez said.

"Today, you talk to coaches around the country and they'll tell you every kid they recruit thinks he will wind up in the NFL," Donchez said. "Back then, that expectation wasn't there. You went to college to play football, all you wanted to do was make the travel team and then get some playing time."

Fueling that change in attitude, he believes, is the NFL's skyrocketing salaries.

"The money back then was very modest," Donchez said. "The multiple of the starting salary in the NFL compared to business or industry for a college graduate was two, maybe three … it really wasn't like you hit the jackpot. Now it is."

Bleamer, Schroy and Smith were selected on the draft's second day.

Like Donchez, Bleamer was living in an off-campus apartment, and like Hartenstine, he had another semester to complete before graduation. He said he didn't expect to be drafted but hung around his apartment "just in case," and his patience was rewarded on the second day when he got his phone call from the Eagles.

"When I heard who drafted me, good grief, I nearly went through the roof," he said. "Basically it was in my backyard."

Soon after being drafted, Bleamer approached then Eagles coach and general manager Mike McCormick and asked "out of curiosity, what game of ours did you watch that caught your eye?"

"McCormick looked me in the eye and said, 'We didn't scout you or see any films. Coach [Joe] Paterno called us up and said, 'You guys haven't taken a guy from Penn State in a while. I think this kid could help you on the line'" Bleamer said with a laugh. "Obviously the process is a little more in depth now than it was back then."

On to the pros …

Hartenstine, who lives in suburban Chicago and still works as head of security for a retirment home, had a 13-year career, 12 of them with the Bears. He made 179 starts for the Bears, at the time a team record, and was part of the fabled 46 defense that dominated New England in the 1986 Super Bowl. Hartenstine is officially credited with 24 sacks (12 in 1983), but that only includes the last six years of his career since the NFL didn't count sacks as an official statistic for his first seven seasons.

Schroy, who had 10 interceptions, 11 fumble recoveries and averaged 12.6 yards per punt return over his career at Maryland, never played for the Eagles but still had the second-longest NFL career of the five. He was recovering from a broken ankle in his first training camp and was released in the Eagles' final cut. Picked up by the New York Jets, Schroy went on to make 63 starts and appear in 113 games over eight seasons, picking off 16 passes in his career — eight of them in 1980, when he was second in the team's MVP voting to former Kutztown star Bruce Harper.

He also had two picks in the 1982 AFC title game against Miami's Dan Marino before a shoulder injury forced him to retire after he spent 1985 on injured reserve. He lives on Long Island and is a sales and marketing director for a recreational products company.

Bleamer, a football coach and teacher at Cane Bay High School in suburban Charleston, S.C., appeared in 24 games with one start over two seasons for the Eagles, then signed with the Jets after being released and appeared in eight games in 1977 with one start.

(Incidentally, the Eagles had only 10 picks in that draft, none in the first six rounds. Only Bleamer and 13th-round pick Tom Ehlers ever wore an Eagles uniform and they along with Schroy are the only ones who ever played a down in the NFL)

Donchez played only one season in the NFL, and, ironically, again wound up Hartenstine's teammate on the Bears. After surviving training camp with the Bills, who at the time featured O.J. Simpson and quarterback Joe Ferguson, Donchez was released just two days before the first game in a roster shuffle.

"I got picked up right away by Chicago and jumped on a plane for Chicago," said Donchez, who played in 14 games, mostly on special teams. The following preseason Donchez re-tore a hamstring he originally injured in high school and "I looked around, thought about some things, and just decided to pack it in."

Still a Bethlehem resident, he recently retired after 36 years at Air Products, which offered him a job out of college.

After being cut by the Colts, Smith said he received feelers from several teams in the World Football League, which had begun play the previous season as a rival to the NFL. But while in camp with the Colts, he was awarded a graduate research assistantship in marine biology at Maryland, and four days after his release he was in the microbiology department.

"The [WFL] offers looked tempting, and a year alter Lou Holtz [who had left North Carolina State to take over the Jets job] offered me a tryout. But I chose not to pursue them," said Smith, who lives in the "horse country" of Virginia, just south of Charlottesville. "I missed football, but I felt I wanted to something more substantial with my life. I admit I had some second thoughts early on, but I still work in that field today and I'm very happy with the choices I made."